Month: March 2015

  Scientists have long believed that light can behave as both a particle and a wave but until today – it’s been a bit difficult to visualize and impossible to photograph. Now, researchers in Switzerland have taken the first ever picture of light as both a wave and a particle - and it's a beauty! To capture the historic photograph, researchers shot laser pulses at a tiny metallic nanowire and watched as the light moved in different directions along the metal wire (more accurately, they watched the emissions of electrons that occurs when light hits a metal surface). Then when the waves ran into each other, they snapped the historic photograph using a new ultrafast microscope. Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle

The dwarf planet, Ceres, continues to puzzle NASA scientists as its Dawn spacecraft approaches the planet to begin its orbit around the mysterious object. The latest images from Dawn were taken about 29,000 miles away from Ceres and have revealed two mysterious bright flashes of light on the planet’s surface. The two bright spots of light appear next to each other in the bottom of a huge crater or volcanic depression. Dawn will go into orbit around Ceres on March 6, 2015 after which NASA will receive higher resolution photographs from the spacecraft. NASA explained, "The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres. This is truly unexpected and still a